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Almost at a steady pace, Helsinki has produced a hit gaming company every couple of years: Rovio’s Angry Birds blew up in 2009 and then Supercell took the crown as one of the highest-grossing iOS game developers in the world last year through Clash of Clans and Hay Day.

Named after the French wine classification, the 25-person startup has been quietly working on a game called the Supernauts, which has been called a more mainstream and accessible take on Minecraft.

Early on, they picked up funding from Supercell-backer Lifeline Ventures and now they’ve racked up an additional $11 million from strategic investors like Qualcomm Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners and lead investor Idinvest Partners.

Their funding comes at a time when the Helsinki gaming community is abuzz with the success of companies like Supercell and Rovio and as dozens of other tiny startups splinter off with talent from both these companies and then longer-standing studios like Remedy and Digital Chocolate’s local office. To an outside observer, it may seem pretty random that Helsinki keeps churning out world-class gaming companies, but the community has deep roots because of these older gaming companies, the existence (and then decline) of Nokia and longstanding events like Assembly, which has been an annual mecca for developers and enthusiasts for more than 20 years.

The company has yet to launch its first game but they’ve been quietly at work on its flagship title for about two years. It’s like a more cartoonish and social version of Mojang’s 8-bit megahit game Minecraft. Players solve puzzles and create shareable worlds while traveling to a flooded Earth to rescue humans.

They don’t have a timeline for when it will be released.

“We will launch it when it’s ready,” Warin said. “We’ve put two years into the game. We will not fumble on the finish line and we have taken a very extensive process in developing the game.”

Supernauts is done in third-person and the artistic style is quite different in feel and form.

“We’ve spent six months perfecting the camera controls and user interface,” Warin said. “There aren’t very many 3D games for a casual audience.”

He said the game’s social features are much deeper than what you’d see in a typical casual game.

“We don’t want to have the standard stuff, where you visit your friends and they give you stuff,” he said. “We have proper multiplayer competitions.”

“We’re not going to grow too quickly and go on a crazy hiring spree. We’re not going to be cranking out new products every six to nine months,” he said. “We want to make sure the people we hire have a good, strong cultural fit with people who want to make games with the same level of ambition that we have.”

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OverviewGrand Cru was founded in 2011 by six Finnish game industry veterans. We are out to revolutionize mobile and social gaming.
THE MISSION
We believe that people want to play together. We believe that if given the right tools, they will create beautiful things together. As gamers, we have seen this in countless hardcore games. Our mission is to bring these tools to everybody, gamer or not. Make social …